Life Sentences (29 page)

Jews still in Poland were at full alarm, and many had to be killed in their houses and on the streets before their trains departed, they had become so obstreperous. Lest we focus our dismay too narrowly: Poles stood by and laughed at the sight—laughed then looted.

The second camp was modeled after the first, except it was housed in a brick building. However, hot weather caused the corpses in the burial pits to swell and rise from the ground in small hills. This putrefaction began to contaminate the local water. A horrible smell was pervasive and seemed to beckon rats and other scavengers, so the SS filled a pit with wood and set it on fire, but bodies that were already all bones burned badly, even when placed on grills and turned now and then, as you might on a company cookout. Cremations continued to make problems, and scientific studies were undertaken to discover the most efficient methods of getting air to and around mounds of corpses so the fire could breathe. As the Jews, naked, their possessions confiscated for auction in Berlin, were driven to
the gas chambers by biting dogs and men with whips and iron bars, their wails of despair and screams from pain were alarming others, so the SS recruited a small orchestra to drown the hubbub by playing local hit tunes.

When, in April of 1943, Himmler ordered the camps closed and their presence erased, the job was almost done, although the task had become more difficult, and on several occasions a few prisoners of war and a passel of Jews had broken out, killing several guards and embarrassing officials. The Germans covered some sites with shrubbery, trees, and flowers, but this concealment remained rudimentary, although even the most inadequate erasures would give comfort later to those who denied the existence and/or operation of the gas chambers. By the summer of 1944 grave robbers had arrived, looking for the gold that might have been missed, only to turn up bones and rotting clothes.

Evans supplies very instructive details of the camps’ procedures so that we may measure just how flourishing evil can become when provided with healthy circumstances. The novelty of Auschwitz was the use of a chemical pesticide called Zyklon B, whose most active ingredient was sulfuric acid, and whose lethal fumes were discovered by an accident that asphyxiated a cat. It was used in obedience to the following directions: “The men were herded into the room, the doors were sealed, then powdered Zyklon-B was shaken down through holes in the roof. The warmth generated by the bodies packed into the chamber below quickly turned it into a deadly gas.” Those chosen for work detail had a serial number tattooed on their left arm that is now notorious and essential to the cinema.

Some camps were for show, like the back lots of movie studios, and were unable to make direct contributions to the killings, only mislead chosen visitors about them. In a few ghettos (Warsaw is the best-known) there were uprisings as well as scattered signs of individual resistance by the Polish underground; but what slowed the German war on humanity (besides the Soviet army) was simply the size and consequent inefficiency of it. Evans ascribes the principal
cause of the monstrous behavior required of its organizers to their “visceral hatred of Jews,” but the word
visceral
tends to beg the question. How was anti-Semitism, so patently false in all its ages of activity, able to lodge itself in so many minds and thereafter weaken—no, remove—their moral character? How, in general, do people become slaves of foolish ideologies, support them with treasure, allegiance, and time, and act, at their behest, so vilely, so contrary to their own interest? History is full of absurdities masquerading as absolutes. Like whooping cough, beliefs get to children early, make their symptoms chronic, hold out useless hopes, and offer vain excuses. It is reason’s business to disbelieve, but the voices of reason have as much effect here as frogs in a swamp.

This book has many themes which a reader might follow instead of the bloody course I’ve chosen, such as the struggles for power among the many Nazi administrators when any one of them is trying to obtain status, protect his perks, or strengthen his grip, during both sweet times and sour. Women as a rule did not have such problems. They simply served. Generals, however, were a dime a dozen. Hitler repeatedly replaced one medal bearer with another and blamed them for trying to save their troops when the order was to die. Meantime, in the midst of a war that was not going well, there were other wars that developed a personality of their own the way Verdun did during World War I: such as the siege of Leningrad (“… the city’s inhabitants were starving, eating cats, dogs, rats, and even each other”); the struggle for Stalingrad (“even those who were not hospitalized were sick, starving, frostbitten, and exhausted”); or the Battle of Kursk (“the greatest land battle in history”).

Setting cities on fire seemed the favored method of bringing death from the air. Evans’s description of the raids and incendiary bombings of Hamburg is especially graphic. Although troops did get dug in, as they had in World War I, panzers brought fluidity to the front line that matched the maneuvers of armadas of planes.

As all the wars that made up the Great War began to go badly, so did the temperament of the German people, and their enthusiasm
for it. It could be observed that party members no longer wore their party badges. After the bombing of Hamburg, angry citizens who observed that symbol in the street might tear the insignia from the wearer’s coat. A contemporary parallel would be the way the American flag once flew in front of American homes and rode around on American cars until Iraq turned drearily boring, embarrassing, and deadly, whereupon the flag no longer waved o’er the homes of the brave. The Germans could become audibly grouchy if the government cut their ration of bread, but not so much when it killed Jews. By this time in the concluding history of the Third Reich the numbers in the text no longer refer to those of murdered undesirables or captured soldiers but to bushels of imported wheat, the total of factory workers building airplanes, or the limit of calories allowed each citizen; and the narrative, always heavy with statistics, is likely to sink out of the view of the eye.

In the aftermaths of heavy and repeated bombing, dazed German citizens were forced to find places among the ruins of their cities to bury bodies wrapped in paper like parcels, since the cemeteries were full and incineration was not feasible. What could burn, had. The dead were hidden in mass graves amid household furnishings—beds, jars, pots, clothing, carpets, cabinets—strewn about in a tumble of plaster, bricks, and stones. The picture Evans paints contradicts the view, frequently held, that the bombings did not have any noticeable effect on the German people’s will to fight. That will was weakening rapidly, as were those of the armed forces, increasingly beset on multiple fronts, misled by Hitler’s intransigence, and compelled by the Soviets’ superior numbers to retreat. Such cohesiveness as remained depended upon a continuing hatred of Jewry and Soviet Communism, loyalty to their comrades in arms, and a realistic awareness of the consequences of defeat, as well as a fear of their own officers, frantic to maintain discipline, who were fond of courts-martial and the firing squads that shot thirty thousand men as a result of the incredible three million trials ordered for numerous offenses. The Reich also began to lose allies—Bulgaria first, then all of Italy, whose
failures Germany was required to punish by corralling 650,000 soldiers for chain gang–style labor (50,000 eventually died in harness), and executing 6,000 others who resisted.

As the German armies fell back they enjoyed the classic revenge of burning any handy hospital, town, field, or manor they encountered, as well as employing some of the lesser forms of vandalism: feasting in occupied homes; stealing bedding, toys, clothes, shoes; and relaxing after their larger exertions by trying on the owners’ hats, smashing what would readily smash, and leaving toilets aswim with their stools. Jews were required to ransom themselves with gold. This could occasionally work. Members of the partisan resistance were sometimes shot in conveniently located catacombs, an admirable economy of means. The German troops did not fail to use geography as a weapon, flooding the Pontine Marshes back to pre-Mussolini levels and reintroducing malarial mosquitoes, which produced ninety-eight thousand cases for them in two years, not all deadly, although the Germans took the local quinine with them when they fled. Straight-out germ warfare was unusual for the Nazis, who preferred more indirect methods—to overwork and starve their victims until they fell ill of disease.

Death is the repeated motif of this essay, and necessarily of Evans’s masterful book, because death and the threat of death were the principal tools of Nazi rule—the noose, the gas, the gun. For citizens, a list of actions punishable by death might begin with the use of a weapon while committing a crime, hoarding food supplies, damaging military equipment, or making faulty munitions, and end with anything that hindered the war effort, including an injurious comment. Criminals serving a term greater than eight years were too costly to the state to keep swaddled in prison’s comforts, and were likely to be packed off “for extermination by labor.” Many, due for release before eight years had passed, were retained until they qualified for this extinction. “So many executions were taking place in Germany’s state prisons by this time that the Ministry of Justice allowed them at any time of the day instead of, as previously, only
at dawn.” And the prisons filled and emptied like bowls of peanuts on a bar.

So hospitals, prisons, courts, police, ordinary murderers, labor gangs, suicides, soldiers, Gestapo, the SS, partisans, local militias, enemy fire were all active agents of death, death from all sides the way a billiard caroms: death that fell from the air, death borne by swampy water, death that opened from the earth as if every furrow were a mouth, death by whispered denunciation, death by every means imaginable including highway accidents, common fevers, cancers, strokes, and old age. Yet only one Nazi unit was called the Death’s Head, indicating considerable restraint. Of course, there was little need for public boasting about the regime’s death-dealing skills. The two Christian institutions (the Lutheran and the Catholic churches) were quite aware of the killing sprees in their countries of residence, but remained mum out of fear of reprisals, either from the regime if the Nazis won or from the Jews if Germany lost. This also may have been the most common attitude among the general population. “From 1943 onwards, they were mentally preparing themselves to deflect this retribution as far as they were able, by denying all knowledge of the genocide once the war was lost.”

That the war was lost only increased the feverish pace of the killings, which were now defended as a moral necessity, a task to be completed despite temptations to tenderness, and because the cleansing was almost complete. Himmler’s message was: The world may condemn us for carrying out such an unpleasant assignment, but somebody’s got to do it. The Jews who remained to be gassed lived mostly in Hungary, whose Admiral Horthy had refused so far Hitler’s requests to hand them over. The German army moved in and immediately began carrying out their obligations by transporting 438,000 Jews to Auschwitz before Horthy was able to put a stop to their shipments.

Once a repressive regime begins to stumble, there will be many ready to help with a push, but in Germany every sort of opposition had been so effectively frightened into silence or rubbed out during
the time National Socialism reached or solidified its power that even Hitler’s most ardent enemies remained compromised, divided, and weak. The Prussian conservatives were often guilty themselves of ordering Jews into camps, or willing, as a postwar gesture, to repeal the legal rules against Jews only because “the very small number of Jewish survivors would no longer constitute a ‘danger for the German race.’ ” For some, discrimination was legit if murder wasn’t.

The plots to assassinate Hitler were often ham-handed and always unlucky, but they led to lots of death anyway, as the conspirators were executed or killed themselves—to the sum of five thousand. For those arrested, the firing squad was preferred, and for the suicides the revolver or poison capsule were both more popular than the grenade. For the cinema fans, films were made during which numerous traitors were hanged by a thin rope to slow the strangle, and their pants pulled down for the purpose of postmortem humiliation. Hitler particularly liked these showings. Under the policy of “leave no possible enemy behind,” wives, children, cousins, aunts, and uncles of the plotters were sent to Ravensbrück.

V1 and V2 rockets bore the same old bombs, only the method of delivery was new; however, nuclear weapons were unique to life and death equally. The scale of their killing could not yet be clearly imagined, but it was believed to be considerable. It would be the ultimate triumph for a death-mad world and would, again, put the German nation at the wheel. Had Hitler wished to hurry the appropriate research, there still would not have been time or materials enough to complete the project. Hitler did not have any enthusiasm for nuclear physics anyway, because it was an area of study he felt belonged too intimately to the Jews. There was at least one very promising nerve gas, but it was difficult to manufacture without killing many of its makers, and continued to have the same flaws poison gas has always had: it blows where the wind goes. As Albert Speer admitted, they also had drones on the drawing table, jet planes, and heat-seeking missiles, but these advancements would have to wait for the Americans, who would have German expertise to aid them.

In the last days, Germans began killing one another: to settle old scores while pretending the enemy was within. It was nearly as if anyone who looked gloomy should be shot. But they were still killing with dedication if not cleverness and invention. Five hundred and sixty-five inmates of a woman’s prison were, in the middle of an icy winter, walked to another jail thirty-six kilometers away. They kept falling over one another until only forty remained. From households there was little to loot, but women were still available for rape. Former dignitaries, foreign and domestic, who hadn’t been murdered yet but held hostage instead, were executed forthwith. Those in prison for whatever reason were killed simply because they were handy, just in case, and because the Jews were already dead and someone should be dying. “Sick inmates were shot in their beds.…” Advancing armies made the murder industry in the concentration camps a matter of some urgency. Yet evidence of gas chambers, shooting locales, and burial parks had to be removed too, and it was difficult to clean up and kill at the same time. Russian prisoners of war, retreating along with German troops, died of weather, deep snows, and neglect. Killing was now casual wherever you were in the combat zone. Death marches so disorganized they “meandered across the country, even doubling back on themselves” at least emptied a camp by scattering bodies over treks of sometimes 250 miles. Nothing but surrender or the arrival of Allied armies slowed and finally ended this last deadly tantrum.